Build a DIY Sous Vide Cooker in an Afternoon

I love when I get to entertain my inner geek in the name of more flavorful food. This week, I experimented with sous vide cooking. Even better, I got to build and wire a controller to save about $450 of the cost of buying a fancy sous vide machine.

Instructions

I found an awesome post on Instructables describing how to build a sous vide cooker for less than $40. You can follow the instructions to build your own here:

*Denotes an affiliate link**Of course, you can get all one color of wire, but the convention of black=load, white=neutral, and green=ground can help keep all the wires straight.

Tips for a successful build

Some items came up during the building of my sous vide controller that weren't specifically mentioned in the Instructables tutorial:

Use a combination of solid and stranded wire. Solid wire stuffs nicely into the controller pins, but it's incredibly stiff. It's not easy to stuff all that wire inside the box without everything coming apart. Use more flexible stranded wire for the wiring that doesn't need to be stuffed in the controller pins.

Electrical tape is your friend. Tape together wires that need to be connected via wire nuts before screwing the wire nuts on. You'll be happy you did.

Be ready to solder. Inexplicably, our thermocouple probes were much too small to fit snugly in their designated controller pins. We had to solder a piece of 14 AWG solid copper wire to the tiny probes to get them to make a reliable connection.

If you're not familiar with wiring, get some help from a friend who is. It might seem easy in principle, but if you've never wired an outlet before, you may find yourself super frustrated.

Test the functionality of the box before screwing it shut. 'Cause it might not work right away, and you'll have to open it up again. Just be careful not to touch any of the wiring when the box is plugged in!